


broke everything new again

by Siria



Category: Bourne Legacy (2012)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-22
Updated: 2012-12-22
Packaged: 2017-11-22 01:30:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,163
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/604325
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Siria/pseuds/Siria
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Training drilled it into them, over and over: there was protocol but there was no routine.</p>
            </blockquote>





	broke everything new again

**Author's Note:**

  * For [infiniteeight](https://archiveofourown.org/users/infiniteeight/gifts).



> A Yuletide Treat! Thank you to my beta, Sheafrotherdon.

Training drilled it into them, over and over: there was protocol but there was no routine. Have caches of money and IDs and burner phones, but even your handler should never know where all of them were. Lie about your name, your age, your hometown, your favourite flavour of ice-cream with smooth indifference, but never let it get too comfortable; don't get attached. Routine was stupid; routine got you killed. 

Training drilled it into them, over and over: this is the protocol, this is the routine. Two fifty green, four hundred blue, to be taken daily without fail. Routine stopped you from being stupid; routine stopped you from getting killed. Not exactly logically consistent, but the CIA didn't do so hot on thinking things through, it seemed. Invested millions in creating operatives who could think; freaked out when they realised they'd created operatives who could think.

They were right about one thing—routine was hard to break. Sometimes, Aaron still woke up and reached for the pillbox that no longer hung from around his neck, experienced that moment of hiccuping panic at the thought that he'd lost his meds. It happened often enough that it didn't even wake Marta up fully anymore. One of her hands would fumble out from beneath the sheets, stroking along the bare skin at his neck, his wrists—pulse-points, Aaron knew, all the places where adrenaline shivered most intensely—tugging at him until he lay back down beside her, while she murmured half-conscious words of comfort into his ear. 

He and Marta got lost half a dozen times over once they left Palawan, working their way through countries and passports. They could have, should have, moved with more purpose and less predictability, but there was some reckless little part of him that liked crossing from Laos to Vietnam on a passport that said Kenneth James, just in the hopes that they'd realise he was laughing at them. It liked lingering in Singapore because they were playing at newlyweds there, and Marta would never make a good actress, so Aaron was pretty sure that the way she always kissed him for a moment longer than she had to meant that it was real. 

They worked their way west, making a broad circuit around the Indian Ocean with a brief diversion to a contact of Aaron's in Kiev, who could make up a much more complete set of papers, complete with a digital trail, than Aaron could have done on his own. Then they pushed south, and south, until they were in the highlands of southwestern Tanzania and their names were James and Zoe Atkinson. The cooler temperatures and low humidity meant that white NGO workers were common enough to attract little curiosity in all but the smallest villages, but it was still remote enough that they could live almost entirely off the grid even in a larger town. 

Aaron was sitting outside the front door one evening their first week there, fiddling with their small wind-up radio to see if he could improve the reception; he'd just sprayed the inside of the house with mosquito repellent and there was no point trying to go in for a while. From his vantage point, he could see Marta approaching for the last half mile; her arms were folded over her chest, her shoulders hunched, in a way that told him she was wavering between anger and upset and trying not to show either. Her messenger bag banged rhythmically against her hip. "What is it?" he said, squinting up at her when she got close. 

"I feel like such a fraud!" she said, dropping down beside him without ceremony and leaning against his side. "I'm a geneticist! A virologist! What the hell do I know about primary care medicine? These people trust me to do a job and I just, I go in there every day and I…"

Aaron frowned down at the radio. He'd trusted Marta, even though every bit of his training had argued against it—he'd gone to find her, for all that she'd been willfully oblivious to the consequences of her work. He'd seen something he could trust in the slight hesitations of her hands; the way she couldn't always meet his eyes, but she'd still been the one to administer his physical, thirteen times in a row. Trust didn't always follow neatly from who a person was or what they'd done. He didn't think she wanted to hear that, though, so he looked up and kissed her gently, waggled his eyebrows and said, "Hey doc, no one's going to doubt your skill with the syringe, okay?"

She half laughed against his mouth, half sobbed, and in the morning she wiped her eyes and braided her hair before she pushed back the mosquito netting and walked determinedly down the hill to work. 

Aaron got to know what she felt a couple of weeks later, when he was asked to work at a couple of the local secondary schools, help the kids with their English reading and pronunciation. He'd figured what the hell; he too conspicuously didn't have much to do, and it'd be nice to know what a routine felt like when it wasn't Treadstone-mandated. It went fine, the kids enthusiastic and fascinated by his hair, now a little too long for military regs, and Aaron smiled and joked with them and when he got home that evening he sat on their small porch with his head in his hands, shaking. He'd sat there with the kids, coaxing them through multisyllabic words and unfamiliar idioms, and the whole time he did so he'd had Kenneth right there with him: poor fucking Kenneth, for whom linking sounds with letters had always been a terrifying task. 

He went back the next day, anyway, and the day after that.

Their little house was ringed by eucalyptus trees, tall and pungent, that swayed in time with the wind. The rustle of the leaves was background noise to the staticky voices of the World Service that came through their radio's speakers: round-vowelled, dispassionate presenters talking about Treadstone and Blackbriar and Larx while the CIA ate itself alive in a pretty satisfying way. 

"It's not over, though," Marta said, poking at her bowl of rice and beans. 

"No," Aaron said, putting his own bowl to one side. 

She took a deep breath. "We'll have to move on from here sometime soon, won't we?" 

Aaron nodded. "Another couple of months."

"Okay," she said, and smiled at him without hesitation, and it hit him all over again—how brave she could be, how determined even though less than a year ago she'd lived her life safely removed from all the hard questions; how she'd stayed even though she had no need for him.

"Okay," he said, and reached out and wrapped his hand around her left ankle as an anchor, a promise—because maybe they'd never have routine, but that didn't mean they couldn't have home.


End file.
